1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to architectural and engineering projects and to Extensible Markup Language (XML), and in particular, to a method, apparatus, and article of manufacture for organizing and managing architectural projects with supporting XML documents.
2. Description of the Related Art
The use of Computer Aided Design (CAD) application programs is well known in the art. CAD application programs are often expensive, complex, and difficult to learn how to use. In this regard, CAD drawings often have many components that a user may desire to separately control and manage. However, prior art methods for organizing and managing components of a drawing remain complex and difficult. Further, prior art techniques fail to take advantage of documents defined by document definition languages (e.g., XML) as part of this organizational and management process. The disadvantages of the prior art may be better understood by describing prior art drawing file structures and document definition languages.
Drawing Programs
As described above, CAD applications are often used to create drawings used in the architectural, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry. The drawings are often defined by a collection (referred to as objects) of one or more graphical elements, such as lines, circles, polylines, text, or dimensions. For example, a collection of various lines may make up a door or window object. CAD programs may treat each object as a single element for creation, manipulation, and modification. Some CAD programs may also provide objects that are special entities with predefined behaviors and display characteristics.
Information relating to an object may be entered and defined in one or more properties of the object. For example, users may have the capability to enter information about the style, dimensions, location, schedule data, and/or other important characteristics of an object.
To view a drawing, different views or layouts may be created. The views provide different ways to work on and plot a drawing/model at the various stages in the design process.
While the prior art provides a limited structure for drawings, the prior art lacks the ability to easily manipulate and organize drawings and objects.
Document Definition Languages
Document definition languages define how a document or information is to be displayed (e.g., in a web browser). Sets of rules, referred to as schemas, may provide for a particular structure for information. For example, an address schema may comprise constraints and limitations as to the order and sequence of elements and datatypes that define an address.
To enable the interpretation and display of information in a particular format, document definition languages and standard programming languages are utilized to define a document. For example, hypertext markup language (HTML) is widely used to define web pages. However, HTML utilizes a predefined set of “tags” to describe elements on the web page. As a result, extensible markup language (XML) has become and is becoming more widely used on the internet. XML is more flexible than HTML and allows tags to be defined by the developer of the web page. Thus, tags for virtually any data items such as product, sales representative, and amount due, can be used for specific applications, allowing web pages to function like database records.
Thus, a schema is a model for describing the structure of information. An XML schema describes a model for a whole class of documents. The model describes the possible arrangement of tags and text in a valid document. A schema may also be viewed as an agreement on a common vocabulary for a particular application that involves exchanging documents.
While XML is increasingly utilized for web-based documents on the Internet, XML has not been frequently applied to the computer-aided design industry. In this regard, XML has not been utilized to manage and organize projects, drawings, or objects.